I would love for people to steal Kakoune's text editor, I think it's an improvement over Vim for modal editing.

I've been a longtime user of the Vim style of editing, but I checked out Kakoune several years ago and was impressed. I tried it for a week or two and was starting to prefer it over Vim.

The problem is that while Kakoune is a very good competitor to Vim the program, I am only rarely in need of a terminal based editor. The vast majority of my time is spent in full fledged IDEs or in Web-based editors, all of whom have Vim plugins so that I can consistently use the same style.

It's always bummed me out a little bit. I spend the majority of my work days using Vim keys for editing text, and there is an editing style I'd actually prefer to use but I can't because there isn't already widespread adoption. There's not enough benefit for me to learn it if I can't use it everywhere, and switching back and forth with Vim seems extremely difficult.

I really regret every trying Kakoune. It was totally not worth it, but I just can't go back now.

I've switched from Vim to Kakoune 3 years ago, and lack of support for this modal editing style elsewhere is really frustrating. It is better than Vim's, but in practice that's not a significant difference, and the pain of switching back and forth is something I'm agonizing over all the time.

BTW. The exact kakoune modal editing mode is not even all that flawless. The way x and X work on empty lines is infuriating, and I am actually using a personal fork of kakoune to fix it. https://github.com/dpc/kakoune-dpc . I went so far as prototyping a spinoff of Kakoune: https://github.com/dpc/breeze to look for improvement, but building a full-featured text editor is a lot of work, and I it's not like it's going to fix the problem of switching.

Would you say a few words on what makes Kakoune modal editing better than Vim's?

Not the same guy but I'm a convert from vim also.

>Would you say a few words on what makes Kakoune modal editing better than Vim's?

I guess the big difference is multiple selections. In Kakoune Normal mode you can select multiple selections, and your normal mode commands operate on all those selections at once, and if you switch to insert mode you can insert text at all of those multiple cursors.

I had a paragraph with examples that I just deleted because it had sentences like "you would simply type s;b&" and that makes you sound like a crazy cultist. A better endorsement is maybe: where I would in the past write a script in python or awk to get info from a log or a csv I usually just jump straight to kakoune and edit the file down to the data I want.

This is why I switched to vis (https://github.com/martanne/vis) after trying kak for a couple days (and previously being an nvim user). ^k and ^j add cursors directly above and below the current one, :x/foo/ selects all occurrences of ‘foo’ in the current selection or (if there’s no current selection) file (this is based on the command language of Rob Pike’s `sam` editor, and foo can be a structural regex), and then you can manipulate them using standard vi bindings.